Avoid making changes at post-level

 

For the past several weeks I’ve been making plenty of changes to my sites, mostly in the backend. Eventually, I’ll get into all that once I know I haven’t totally blown up my sites.

During this process, I decided to put on AdThrive video ads on my site.

It’s easily done. AdThrive just flips a switch I think. There’s probably a bit more than that involved on their end but in a perfect world, nothing for me to do.

I sent the email. An hour later I was told the video ads were running.

After a day or so, while ripping through a bunch of posts on the front end making sure I didn’t mess something up with other changes I noticed the video ad wasn’t showing on select posts.

That was odd.

I emailed AdThrive and they politely responded telling me I had turned video ads off for an entire category.

And for the life of me I don’t ever recall why on earth I would do that.

But I did.

And that category has 1,000 posts.

My next question was whether AdThrive could override the post-level control.

Sadly they couldn’t.

The only solution was to go into each post and uncheck the box.

It’s in progress currently.

And it serves as another very strong reminder to not make changes at the post level.

All changes should be via some site-wide control.

AdInserter (free plugin) is a great tool that offers many site-wide controls.

Code Snippets (free plugin) offers pretty much unlimited site-wide controls if you know how to code or can hire a coder (I use Codeable to find qualified coders for smallish jobs).

​GeneratePress‘ Elements (hooks) offer great site-wide control.

Any theme with a hook system works. Genesis Framework and Astra offer such systems.

When you need to make changes, even if it’s to only a few posts, make them at the site-wide level.

Even if you have to tag them with some term so you can deploy changes via the tag taxonomy, that’s better than making the changes at the post-level.

My recent minor fiasco wasn’t my first fiasco.

Way back in the day, I put AdSense codes in individual posts.

After a while, I decided I wanted to test different ad locations.

So I went into each post moving AdSense code around.

After the first time doing that, I thought there must be a better way. Surely there’s a plugin for this.

Of course, there was.

Again, I learned the hard way.

Rule to follow: for every change you make, can it easily and quickly be undone? If not, is there a way to implement the change so that it is easily undone? If not, do you really want to make the change?

Ideally, you want to undo changes without having to restore a previous backup on your server. That should be done in only dire circumstances, especially if you’re adding content regularly and making other changes.

It’s no fun reverting to a backup that’s 5 days old and losing 5 days’ worth of work. Again, I know from experience.

Pitter patter, time to get back at ‘er. Just 400 posts to go to get the video ads fully deployed.